Tenacity: Floss Audacity Fork
github.com
github.com
After alleged harassment campaign. What we know for sure is the following – the former maintainer ran poll for github's users opinion on the project name, added «sneedacity» as valid choice, and then... declared the poll results invalid blaming foreign influence for the winner as well as for subsequent criticism.
Even up-to-date The Register article states: 'a search of the forum shows no evidence of cookiengineer's address details being shared nor calls for physical violence'.
How comes what there is a proof of genuine Jenna Jameson visit to /b/ while absolutely no evidence to back up the claims for very recent event?
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1) The maintainer is telling the truth, and I assume they're lying.
The maintainer's life is now even worse, because not only do they fear for their safety, but no one even believes it's happening!
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2) The maintainer is lying, and I believe them.
I guess I'll end up feeling unnecessarily sorry for someone? I'm having trouble seeing the negative consequences here.
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Suffice to say, I'd much rather just take their story at face value.
Well... being easily manipulated into believing the hoax and taking a side in silly fork war. And implicitly approving what rigged poll is just fine for community.
I don't want to condemn anyone nor to clear anyone, but your analysis is binary and misses two important cases ③ maintainer didn't lie, just exaggerated things a bit, ④ exploiting public fears about 4chan.
The maintainer filed a police report for what it's worth, so any evidence beyond what's been provided and which is already more than enough will come out in court and not before.
Hackers on Steroids stories are welcome and appreciated!
PS: Looks like curtain is already involved in this case. All we need to find is a dog.
> "The safety of my family is worth more than an open source project. They found out my address via a YouTube video where someone was posting my nickname combined with my real legal name (which meanwhile got taken down due to my asking). The incident happened shortly 23:00 CEST [21:00 UTC], today; and the police took over this case."
And people call me "paranoid" when I go to inconvenient-but-practicible lengths to keep my dox off the internet.
I've long since lost count of how many times I've been ridiculed as "paranoid" by the clueless over various absolutely basic and obvious security practices. If choosing to be wise and safe is "paranoid", then count me in. I'd rather be "paranoid" in the eyes of people who actively fight tooth and nail to stay ignorant about online/network security than fall victim to one of the many consequences of not choosing safety over convenience and ignorance.
I am not discounting the effects of the harrasment. Shit online is one thing, but once they start coming to people's place of living is an entirely different thing altogether. That's beyond ridiculous, and I really hope the police take this seriously. I'm going through similiar/different home harrasment issues, and I can definitely sympathize.
Doing this shit because someone with a software package does something you don't agree with? Really sounds like mental problems to me, as that's the only thing I can think of. Rational people don't do that.
We in Cyberpunk shit nao
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/no-open-source-audac...
To quote:
Why did this project fork audacity/audacity?
You can find more information on the causes of the fork here:
Privacy policy which may violate the original project's GPL license [0]
Contributer's License Agreement (CLA) which may violate the same GPL license [1]
Attempts at adding telemetry using Google services for data collection [2]
[0] https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213
Telemetry (which was opt-in and not merged), crash reporting, etc. do not make software non-free. CLAs do not violate the GPL -- the FSF uses a CLA for GNU projects. So neither of these make Audacity non-FLOSS.
The privacy policy language is not binding and does not override the GPL. I think including it was a mistake and that it should be removed, solving the problem. Plenty of proprietary software (Windows, etc.) has crash reporting and telemetry and doesn't have a blanket "no kids allowed" policy, and Microsoft has better lawyers than Muse Group.
It would certainly be a good idea for Audacity to, by policy, enforce that any kind of crash reporting, auto-updating, analytics, etc. is opt-in. Perhaps the existence of a fork will push them to do this.
Collecting "telemetry" on minors, specifically under 13, without the minors' parents permission is illegal. In order to collect telemetry, they have to restrict the application's use to those over 13 (added to their privacy policy, for some reason, but I suspect that would not be satisfactory), which violates the "no restrictions on use" clause from the GPL.
This seems to be a bad interpretation. This is not adding restrictions on use, this is complying with other legal restrictions that are already there. If that were true, you wouldn't be able to have things like chat clients be GPL, because the same restrictions would apply there with allowing chat servers to collect data.
I suspect there would also be an argument that an intentional distributed system like a chat client/server would be a different beast from an application like an audio editor.
Any interpretation of GDPR expansive enough to prohibit children from using software containing an auto-updater would also certainly prohibit them from sending an email or browsing most websites.
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/com...
They are more focused on picking a name, logo and who is in charge than they are on pushing releases. By comparison, Sneedcity is already making changes and pushing releases out.
IMO this is a group that is more interested in "owning" a popular open-source project than they are maintaining an open-source project. Someone saw the Audacity drama as an opportunity to pad their resume by "running" an open-source project.
As ESR pointed out forks live and die by the legitimacy of the broader community, and so far I haven't seen anything from these team that suggests they are legitimate.
Will be interesting to see if they'll actually "maintain" it or just merge upstream once in a while and do releases.